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Mo Yan China

Mo Yan was born in 1955 in Shandong, China, as Guan Moye.  Mo Yan is a pen name, meaning “don’t speak,” that he decided on to remind himself not to speak too much.  He began writing while he was still a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, in 1981.  He was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the Army’s Cultural Academy three years later.  Mo Yan uses often disturbing images and ideas for the purposes of social commentary, and for it is one of the most often banned writers in China.  Quite often, he is published outside of China because of these bans.  He has won many awards, including the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2009, with Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011 with Frog.

He's awarded of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".